According to hoary tradition, there are two obsessive questions in Russian history: who is guilty and what is to be done? This assertion is likely another Russophobic trope in which Russia was, is and always will be a mess populated by supine drunks slurring "Not me" and "Pass the bottle". Nonetheless, good questions they are and ones that Europeans should ponder. Here are some circumstances that call out for doing something different.

"European Union as an emerging superpower" - Wikipedia has a whole article on it. And, on paper, it is: the population, the economic power, the potential military power, the intellectual power and everything else necessary to become a significant independent player on the world scene - fully equal to any other major power. Except... it isn't. Why isn't it? Why did it follow Washington's lead and sanction Russia? The sanctions have certainly cost it more than the USA and probably more than Russia; Washington, on the other hand, never sanctions Russian rocket engines or Russian oil. Why do the Europeans dutifully swallow it down? Many of them followed Washington into Afghanistan and other disastrous military adventures for a reward of failure and crisis. At least they've found the will to stop pretending Guaido is really President of Venezuela but they're piling on Belarus at Washington's command. Why? No kind of "superpower" on the geopolitical stage, the EU pretty well does what it's told by Washington. There's the occasional rebellion - Germany and Nord Stream 2 - but then the obsequious sending of a warship on a FON mission to please Washington. Hoping to cut the cost with a cringing attempt to placate Beijing. Are these the actions of a self-respecting independent country? What is to be done?

As Australia's Covid-19 deaths exceed 1,000, a grim toll but modest by global standards, a country that has used relentless lockdowns now faces perhaps its biggest health policy challenge of the pandemic — how to reopen.

The highly infectious delta variant has breached the country's fortress-style controls and entrenched itself deep enough in Sydney, Australia's biggest city, and with a foothold in Melbourne, that authorities have dispensed with plans to eliminate it.

Instead, they plan to ramp up Australia's lagging vaccination effort and live with Covid-19, an approach that would help struggling businesses but which is opposed by states determined to crush the disease.

Australia reported four fatalities on Monday, taking the total death toll from Covid-19 to 1,003, according to government data. It has logged an average of two to three deaths a day recently, the data shows.

But while deaths are creeping higher, infections are surging to successive record highs above 1,200 a day. With more than half the population in lockdown, even those areas with little or no infections are affected.

The exuberance that accompanied Australia's early suppression success has since been replaced with community frustration at a delayed vaccine program that has only recently picked up pace. Just over 33% of those aged 16 and older have received two vaccine doses, well below most comparable nations, according to a Reuters tracker.

The Taliban* marched into Kabul on 15 August, taking control of the Afghan capital two weeks before the last of US troops were set to leave. The speed of the advance surprised Washington, which has spent over $2 trillion and nearly 20 years trying to build up a functioning Afghan government and military.

As much 80 percent of Afghanistan's budget has vanished now that the Taliban has taken over and Kabul's western patrons have cut funding, data provided by US government officials and agencies suggests.

According to a recent report by the United Nations, prior to the Afghan government's dramatic collapse and the Taliban takeover, the Islamist group collected between $300 million and $1.6 billion from areas it controlled in a series of taxation schemes on crop harvests and wealth (10 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively), as well as mining, trade, and narcotics. For a country of over 38 million, such sums are paltry when it comes to being able to feed the population, pay salaries to officials, and fund various development projects.

If it were possible to say with absolute scientific authority that vaccinations are the best way for the planet to escape from the Covid-19 death grip, then it might seem plausible - albeit still highly arguable - for governments to demand proof of 'the mark' for participating in the global economy. As things stand, however, nothing to date indicates that there are not more effective and reliable means of moving forward.

The relentless push for vaccine passports by opportunistic authoritarians around the globe took a broadside this week as Israeli researchers discovered what had been suspected by many all along: natural immunity acquired via infection, as opposed to vaccinations, provides the best defense against Covid-19 and its seemingly endless array of Greek-coded variants.

The study, which examined up to 32,000 individuals, found that the risk of developing Covid-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated (with the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine), and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher, as compared to those individuals who had acquired natural immunity.

Equally shocking, individuals who were administered two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-times more likely to contract the Delta variation and seven-times more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered from the disease naturally, according to the study, which is up for peer review.

There is abundant evidence of direct foreign influence on the July 11 demonstrations. Yet a month later there is still a healthy debate going on, including opposing views among Cuban revolutionaries and Communist Party of Cuba members about its significance and how to interpret these unprecedented demonstrators. The controversy to be found in an online discussion in Cuban pro-government media has been building up since July 11 to now.

Anti-Cuban Government Cyber Warfare Originating in Spain, Argentina and the US

Expert cyber analyst in Spain Julián Macías Tovar points out that the operation made intensive use of bots and new accounts recently created for the occasion, intending to make a chorus for #SOSCuba. The bot is a software application that runs automated scripts over the Internet. Typically, bot tasks are simple and repetitive, much faster than a person could type text. More than 1,500 of the accounts that participated in the operation with the hashtag #SOSCuba were created between July 10 and 11. The first account that used the hashtag #SOSCuba was one located in Spain. It posted more than a thousand tweets on July 10 and 11, with an automation of five retweets per second.

Tovar analyzed the more than two million tweets using the hashtag #SOSCuba that started asking for "humanitarian aid" given the increasing COVID-19 deaths. This campaign was spurred on by the participation of artists and thousands of newly created accounts and bots that produced mobilizations in the streets. Tovar points out that the campaign was carried out for artists to participate with the HT #SOSCuba.

Happy Birthday, fiat currency!

What, you didn't know that the fiat dollar is 50 years old this month? Well, according to the bankster class and their media lapdogs it is, anyway. Observe:

On 15 August, the United States marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of fiat currency, or a currency that depends on faith in the Federal Reserve and not in the gold standard. Like most 50th anniversaries, this one shows the celebrant worse for wear.

That little gem comes from an article entitled (get this), "The US Fed Can Actually Boost Equality With a Digital Currency."

Right off the bat, if the idea that the fiat dollar is indeed only 50 years old sets off your BS meter, then congratulations! Your BS meter is working. The actual story of the fiat dollar is a much longer and more complex one. Long story short: the fiat dollar was not born in 1971. That was the year of the so-called "Nixon shock," when President Nixon officially severed the gold/dollar link by closing the gold window and thus preventing foreign governments from knocking on the US Treasury's door and asking it to convert their piles of dollars into stacks of gold. That story, too is a much longer and complex one (enjoy some light bedtime reading on De Gaulle vs. the Dollar and The London Gold Pool if you're interested), but the gist is that the Nixon shock was just the final nail in the gold-backed dollar's coffin, not a magical moment in which the dollar suddenly became fiat.

Now, if only the worst piece of propaganda being flouted by the propagandists right now was a misleading headline about the birth date of the fiat dollar, then I could just invite you to explore the links above and we could call it a day. But it's not going to be that easy, is it? No, sadly, this article contains some much more dangerous propaganda: propaganda that touts not just the "benefits" but the inevitability of the coming central bank digital currency (CBDC). And as you should all know by now, the central bank digital currency is the birth of the cashless society control grid that the independent media has been warning about for decades now.

So, let's roll up our sleeves and deconstruct this propaganda, shall we?

The mass evacuation operation of several tens of thousands of Westerners and Afghans was brutally interrupted this week by what the media reported was a 'double-suicide bombing'. 13 US soldiers, an unconfirmed number of Taliban, and dozens of Afghan civilians were killed.

A group of dubious origin named 'ISIS-K', Western media reported, claimed responsibility for the attack. But the US military has since clarified that just one, not two, explosions took place, while some local eyewitness reports claim the majority of civilian casualties were in fact shot dead by US soldiers.

On this NewsReal, Joe and Niall take a closer look at what happened in Kabul Airport, and discuss what the atrocity portends for Afghanistan.


Running Time: 01:33:18

Download: MP3 — 64.1 MB

In my last article, I discussed the new Post-COVID task force which is being spearheaded by Canada's New Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and her fellow Oxford technocrat Mark Carney in preparation for the upcoming COP26 Summit in the UK where it is hoped a Green New Deal may be unveiled as part of a Great Global Reset. In that location, it was made clear that Green Bonds play an important role in the financing of green energy grids which some technocrats hope will straddle the globe in order to reduce Carbon dioxide output to pre-industrial levels in an effort to reduce global climate by 1.5 degrees by 2050.

Echoing this agenda, creepy population control guru once known for his software-stealing savvy named Bill Gates stated:

"Some governments and private investors are committing the funding and the policies that will help us get to zero emissions, but we need even more to join in. And we need to act with the same sense of urgency that we have for COVID-19."

The Devil in the Details

The problem with this reset isn't that the orchestrators of this pending reform desire a new system of value beyond the "monetarist/anything goes" standards of free markets which have dominated our world under decades of globalization. We obviously need that since worshiping money on the unregulated markets just created a massive volatile bubble underlying a $1.5 quadrillion financial weapon of mass destruction called derivatives waiting to blow up.

The problem isn't found in moving the nexus of economic regulation and planning back to governments which the Green New Dealers wish to guide the new world economic order. We obviously need that too, and the fact that the greatest rises in wealth and living standards historically occurred during periods when this sort of dirigiste approach was active should not be lost on anyone. If you have any doubts of this claim, then I refer you to Martin Sieff's excellent analysis of Bismarck and the Failure of the UK's NIS.

The problem is that the standards of value which proponents of the New Green New Deal believe we must re-align our behavior to, have the peculiar characteristic of undoing human activity entirely under the guise of "monetizing the rate of reduction" of humanity's carbon footprints.

Israel Air Force jets struck Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Sunday in retaliation to the launch of incendiary balloons that caused fires and violent demonstrations along the border fence at the weekend.

The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said that a Hamas military compound used for training and weapon production and a shaft for a terror tunnel near Jabalya were struck. "The IDF will continue to respond forcefully against Hamas's terror attempts," the army said in a statement following the strikes.

The Palestinian Wafa News Agency said that one site at Shuhada Street south of Gaza City was hit by four missiles and another near Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip was also hit. There were no injuries.

On the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said before boarding his flight home from Washington that he holds Hamas responsible for what happens in Gaza.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, meanwhile, warned that

"the Zionist occupation bears all the repercussions and consequences of tightening the siege on Gaza and the escalation of the humanitarian crisis among its residents. These extremist policies will lead to an atmosphere of escalation and explosion."

Earlier in the evening, hundreds of rioters gathered at the border fence, burning tires and throwing explosive devices.

IDF forces who had been deployed to the area responded with riot control munitions and Ruger riot-control rifles, according to the IDF Spokesperson Unit. The troops were reinforced by special forces and tank units that had been deployed to the Gaza Division earlier in the week.

Ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton is eyeing up Pakistan, viewing the end of war with Afghanistan as a chance to start another, this time with its nuclear-armed neighbor - a "dramatic change" to "wake people up," he hinted.

Invited onto the Washington Post's 'Please Go On' podcast on Friday to expand on his proposed "solutions" to the "problem" of Afghan withdrawal as set out in an op-ed for the paper earlier this week, Bolton began by sneeringly dismissing the idea that the US could ever truly leave Afghanistan in the first place.

"All of Central Asia is like a big pile of pickup sticks, and they say, 'Hey, we're going to take that American stick out of Afghanistan and nothing else will happen anywhere else.' Completely wrong, and we're seeing the consequences of it now. I think there are things that are going to happen that we can't even foresee at the moment that aren't going to be good."

The mustachioed warmonger continued threateningly warning of the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan - something that had been anticipated and even planned for months, yet somehow in his view the equivalent of an unconscionable sneak attack - could lead to the sudden radicalization of Pakistan's government, which, given its stockpile of nuclear weapons, would clearly be unacceptable. Some of those weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, he suggested, who could carry them anywhere - even across the Mexican border. Any inkling that Islamabad "appears ready to transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists" should result in "preventive action.